“The American Society of Civil Engineers said in 2007 that the U.S. had fallen so far behind in maintaining its public infrastructure -- roads, bridges, schools, dams -- that it would take more than a trillion and half dollars over five years to bring it back up to standard. Instead, these types of expenditures are being cut back. At the same time, public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. The well-off, meanwhile, will withdraw into gated communities, their needs met by privatized providers. ”

“Every zombie story is fundamentally about a breakdown of order, with the infrastructure intact. That infrastructure might be on fire, yes.”

“Someone should say that; why we shouldn’t burn their schools and destroy their buildings and infrastructures instead of burning our own homes.”

“In compulsively keeping myself out of view, I was participating, without realizing it, in a rich New York tradition. Loners and shut-ins and hermits are what keep New York City from imploding. If all the people who never leave their apartments in New York City suddenly left their apartments, the city's infrastructure would crumble.”

“The true cost of war can't be measured in dollars, infrastructure, or body counts. It is tomorrows, wrung out of hope by yesterdays that refuse to retreat, vanish into the smoke of memory.”

“It is a truism today, in this highly technologically-developedculture, that students need technical computer skills. Equally truistic (and, not incidentally, true) is that the workplace hasbecome highly technological. Even more truistic – and farmore disturbing – are the shifts in education over the last twodecades as public elementary schools, public and private highschools, and colleges and universities have invested scoresof billions of dollars on “digital infrastructure,” computers,monitors and printers, “smart classrooms,” all to “meet thedemands” of this new technological workplace."We won’t dwell on the fact – an inconvenient truth? –that those technological investments have coincided with adecline in American reading behaviors, in reading and readingcomprehension scores, in overall academic achievement, in thephenomenon – all too familiar to us in academia – of “gradeinflation,” in an alarming collapse of our students’ understandingof their own history (to say nothing of the history of the rest of the world), rising ignorance of world and American geography, with an abandonment of the idea of objectivity, and with anincreasingly subjective, even solipsistic, emphasis on personalexperience. Ignore all this. Or, if we find it impossible to ignore,then let’s blame the teachers...”